Hands Off the Internet
notes that all major TV networks suddenly (since last year)
stream programs over the net, and concludes:

But it’s also a timely reminder of how these deals are placing
unprecedented strain on the web’s capacity. Internet traffic growth
surged past capacity growth last year. Average traffic was up 75
percent while capacity grew only 47 percent, according to the folks
at TeleGeography.

That may sound like good news.
But remember the U.S. is the third largest country in the world
by population.
So figuring broadband users per 100 persons, as the OECD does,
the U.S. comes in number fifteen out of the thirty OECD countries.
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As we’ve seen, RIAA has been pushing for
Internet Radio DRM,
limitations to the
Fair Use Act,
and apparently
elimination of Internet radio.
This may seem counter-productive.
Doesn’t the Recording Industry Association of America want to
promote its recording artists?
And isn’t radio a traditional way of doing that?
And doesn’t Internet radio provide even wider reach of marketing
for RIAA’s artists’ products?

Well, not really:

The answer is sales. The RIAA isn’t pushing for every artist, it’s
pushing a few select products. One star selling a million records is
worth a lot more than one hundred stars selling ten thousand records each,
even if the end numbers seem to tally up the same.

The
1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) has bounced back and forth
between lower courts and the Supreme Court ever since it was passed,
until
a permanent injunction
was ruled by Judge Lowell Reed
of the U.S. District Court for Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on 22 March.
This case had already been through the Supreme Court, in 2004:

The big split in the most recent Supreme Court COPA decision is between
Kennedy and Breyer, with Kennedy saying that there are plenty of choices
of relatively-effective (and certainly less-restrictive) filtering tools
out there for parents to use, and Breyer essentially saying that parents
are helpless so mandated shields of various kinds should be put in place
to protect kids. It turns out that, in fact, parents are knowledgeable
and are giving advice to their children about what to do online.

It turns out because the Pew Internet and American Life Project
did a study on
Teens, Privacy, & Online Social Networks,
in which they asked things like whether teens hold back information from their
online profiles and how much their parents know about what they’re doing.
That, plus what Judge Reed had already determined, which is that
there are pretty effective software screening products available
that parents can use if they want to.

Yes, even children benefit from open participation through the Internet.
Perhaps parents could learn from their children, too.

As we saw in
AT&T’s Internet Predictions from 1993,
the telco view of the Internet is as a telco-provided service.
This is radically different from the Internet we have grown accustomed to,
but it is what we are likely to get without net neutrality.
Doc Searls gets to the gist:

The short of it is this: As long as we understand the Net as what Jay
Sulzberger calls “some bundle of services delivered by the Telephone
Company and/or the Cable Company”, we’ll not only never have Net
Neutrality, but not even a conclusive conversation about it.

We also can’t have a productive conversation about it if we start
with a regulatory conclusion and work our way back to businees
from there.

Here’s a frame that may help: The Net is the best platform for
free enterprise ever created. How do we help get that built out for
everybody? I suggest that we’ve barely started, and that what Cringely
gets from Comcast (and what most of us get from whatever company provides
it) is still just an early prototype.

If the big-telco-provided Internet were actually a free market
for Internet service provision, we could maybe leave it to the market
to protect Internet participants by providing open access among them.
But it’s not; it’s at best a duopoly (telco and cableco) in most places
in the U.S.
So we need laws to provide for open access.
And it would be nice if we also had more service providers,
so there would be some semblance of competition.

Picture phones on the ground and on airplanes.
That’s in
part 1
of Paleo-Future’s six part
(OK, 9 part) series showing clips from the AT&T video.
Watch the rest for a voice-actuated video-still-CAD phone tablet,
plenty of virtual reality, and online shopping.
In other words, a sort of visual AOL.
Plus artificially intelligent agents and real-time voice translation
with subtitles.
Continue reading →

Hands Off the Internet conflates more things that just aren’t the same.
First, they quote a recent story by a college physics sophomore:

Proponents of net neutrality would like you to think that large
service providers had nothing to do with inventing our modern
Internet, but this notion isn’t true. Even though explorations into
the Internet began at major academic universities for the purpose
of research, it is highly unlikely that private companies would
never have entered into the market of Internet services. Companies
eventually moved into the Internet communications market, albeit
backed by government protectionism through such policies as the
Communications Act of 1934.

—
Net neutrality not for ‘the little guy’,
The only ones who would feel the burden of varying price increases would be large content providers, such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
By Christopher S. Gordon,
Daily Texan,
13 April 2007

Nope, what we want you to know is that the big telcos that are the
primary Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. these days
had nothing to do with inventing our modern Internet.
They also had very little to do with commercializing it.
The first two geographically distributed commercial ISPs
were UUNET and PSINet, back in 1990.
AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and all the other telcos horned in on the party
years later.
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